Thursday, April 9, 2015

Review: Ironheart Artisans Dropper Tray

...so while I was at Adepticon this year, I stopped by the Ironheart Artisans booth.  Mainly to see what new stuff they had, but also just to say hello - I always enjoy talking with them.  They're great guys (& a girl) and, for some reason, are one of the only vendors with the foresight to bring spare hobby supplies (glue, paintbrushes, etc) to a hobby convention.  (They pretty much sell the hobby supplies at MSRP as a courtesy to us gamers).

Anyways, last year I bought one of their paintbrush racks & a couple of their 4-tier stepped paint racks to organize my airbrush paints, and was pleased with both purchases.  This year, they had a really cool prototype paint tray with handles & locking cover, but the problem was it's designed to fit the P3 paint pots - I really don't use that many P3 paints.  But, another item caught my attention - their dropper bottle tray:


See, since my son was born, I've had to go semi-mobile with my hobbying - I watch him a few days per week, so I needed something to carry the essentials.  I grabbed one and brought it home to try it out.

Like most of the Ironheart pieces, it's laser-cut MDF and comes unassembled:


It went together pretty easily (MUCH more easily than their 4-tier trays) and I just put some wood glue on the tabs & edges when I assembled it:


(Now with 100% more festive Easter tablecloth, courtesy of my wife)

And here it is loaded up with 70 of my dropper bottles:


One of the nice things is that the tray is deep enough to hold the bottles securely, but shallow enough that it's easy to read the labels.  This also makes it easy to group certain paints together - for example, all my flesh tones are along one edge:


...and all my "utility" paints are along one edge:

(You might have noticed that most of my paints these days are Reaper, Vallejo, & Army Painter.  I'll cover the reasons for the switch away from GW in an upcoming article.)

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with it - it's cheap enough to buy on an impulse, but sturdy enough that I can toss it on top of my bag and it doesn't break.  (As long as you use a good quality glue to put it together - I used Gorilla Wood Glue).  So far Ironheart Artisans are three for three on stuff I've bought from them - I look forward to seeing what they come up with next!

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